An Unforgivable Absence
We professors learn a lot from our students, sometimes as much or more than they do from us. Reverse learning is an inestimable and very agreeable facet of teaching, and, if we’re lucky, it happens in each class that we teach.
Two years ago, I had one of those unforgettable experiences in my first session with the students of the Global MBA at IE Business School, a program that combines residential periods with synchronous and asynchronous sessions. I teach in this program because it’s compatible with my busy agenda of meetings and frequent trips. The same applies to many of the students, young executives with an average of ten years of managerial experience, and who are located across continents and represent a unique diversity of origin, gender and visions of the world.
At the opening session of the program, after remarking on the diversity of students in the class while explaining the case studies we were going to use on the course, Corporate and Competitive Strategy, one student, white British and male, pointed out that all the CEOs of the companies to be analyzed were “male and western.” I undertook the commitment on the spot to make the necessary changes in the program and did so that same night.
I recall that as an accreditor at European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), one of the frequent criticisms of MBA program content is the preponderance of case studies of large US companies and the absence of case studies on SMEs and companies from other countries. When I designed my program, I had managed to include cases of European and Latin American companies of different sizes, but none of the key players were women.
That night, a quick search for cases of General Management and Strategy with female CEOs provided some interesting results. For example, a recent study by Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) shows that only 11% of the cases of its directory, the most widely used in the world, have a female CEO or director and that most of them were related to organizational behavior typically dealing with the glass ceiling syndrome.1 Under the category General Management or Strategy, I was able to find only a recent case that would fit the themes of my course, related to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, and the launch of the Watson project.
There’s no denying that there are few cases, teaching materials or academic research reflecting diversity in companies, whether gender or otherwise. To a large degree, this reflects the same lack of diversity in companies, where much remains to be done to achieve gender equity, for example, in areas related to selection, promotion, compensation and other forms of recognition.
However, the point the student was making was not just about the lack of diversity in case studies, but also the need for educators to be critical, to guide students toward a model of society and an ideal of the company we want to build. A lack of case studies is not a sufficient argument for not teaching the values and principles we want to instill in our students. To use an extreme example, a professor of political science who believes in democracy, but who unfortunately lives in a dictatorship, would not be satisfied with simply describing the authoritarian institutions around her, but would rather encourage her students to change them.
Similarly, the function of business schools is not just descriptive of explaining how companies work; they also have a critical and prescriptive role: that of developing models that should inspire entrepreneurs, models that can serve as a reference to make organizations not only be more effective, but also fairer.
Female CEOs are still a minority, but this is no excuse for business schools not to design programs with content that will inspire future generations of women and contribute to achieving a balance in the composition of management cadres. Such an approach can only be better for companies and for society.
Here are a few ideas business schools could think about implementing:
- Firstly, develop a greater awareness of the lack of gender diversity in companies, develop similar sensibilities to those of my student, with a strong instinct toward inclusion.
- Produce more case studies, especially in areas such as General Management and Strategy, with women taking the leading role. At IE University, we have started a project to create a catalog that includes cases in all business areas where decision makers are women.
- Improve gender diversity in the faculty. It is no surprise that the percentage of female professors in this field is low. Fortunately, IE Business School has one of the highest percentages of female teachers in the world: 40%.2 We will continue improving this figure as part of a continuous process of improvement.
- Improve the subjects, methodologies and programs in business schools, promoting examples of women who serve as inspiration to young students.
- Facilitate initiatives that promote inclusion and opportunities for women to succeed in academic programs, with specific awards and recognitions. This could be supplemented with coaching or mentoring programs, where mentors can be women or men, such as the “He For She” initiative, committed to equitable business models.
I am hopeful: Over the years, I have seen growing numbers of students committed to transforming reality and achieving fairer social conditions. We will continue to learn from them in class, because teaching is a mutually enriching experience.
One of the goals of this book is to share the inspiring stories of women from the world of business and institutions and that they will serve as a reference for upcoming managers, both men and women. I have selected people I know and admire, who have shared their ideas and experiences with me first hand. The women I have chosen are from every continent and reflect a wide range of cultures and world views. I hope my readers can learn as much from these stories as I have.
Why Female Philosophers Have a Contribution to Make to Management
Management is philosophy in action. Underpinning any business strategy or key decision taken in a company is a conception of the world, a vision of how society should be, how we can improve life for everyone and how we should behave toward each other.
If the important decisions in companies and the behavior of their leaders presuppose a philosophy, a value system, then it is surely important to know, explore and articulate the values of the company or what you believe when you make a decision. An important part of leading a business consists in articulating the vision and values that inform its activity.
This is why it is so relevant to cultivate philosophy, to know the theories that have influenced the thinking, that have sought to provide a vision, a sense of human life and relationships in society. Over the course of history, philosophers have addressed a range of questions that are key in terms of both a personal perspective and business initiatives.
For example, moral philosophy tries to provide an answer to the question as to how to behave. Its approaches can provide solutions in the business decision-making process, which is fraught with moral dilemmas that managers and directors must navigate.
Epistemology can help us explain how we know what we know, as well as to understand the limits of knowledge. As has been pointed out on more than one occasion, we now live in a world with virtually limitless access to knowledge, and yet we are more uncertain than ever before.
Other disciplines related to applied philosophy, such as political philosophy or jurisprudence, aim to provide the means to build fairer social institutions or how to make us freer and more equal, thus improving the lives of people, but they may be also of use while designing fairer and sustainable business organizations.
Human evolution and the development of modern society have seen the appearance of new branches of philosophy that try to offer a rational explanation of the phenomena around us. For example, in recent years, neurophilosophy connects knowledge of the human brain provided by science with models explaining how our minds function or should function. Similarly, feminist philosophy’s goal is to round out conventional philosophy with women’s particular viewpoint, so long ignored throughout the history of thought, as well as introducing questions that are more relevant to women.
Philosophy aspires to transcend, and the aim of most philosophers has been to improve the world around them, to make the world a better place. That said, there’s long been something lacking in philosophy, an unforgivable absence in today’s world. Traditionally, philosophy has been one of the branches of the Humanities dominated by men.
Certain passages of some of the classic works of philosophy are, by today’s standards, unacceptable in the way they refer to women. Socrates is reputed to have said that listening to his wife, Xanthippe, talk was akin to “tolerating the cackling of geese.”3 Perhaps the most revealing episode in the life of Socrates is mentioned in Plato’s Euthyphro, when shortly before he was due to drink hemlock, Socrates dismissed Xanthippe, preferring to spend his last hours talking with his disciples.4
Immanuel Kant, arguably the leading philosopher of the Enlightenment, suggested that men and women had different strengths, “the understanding of the man and the taste of the wife.”5 In the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer wrote that women “remain big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man’.”6
We might usefully ask to what extent the great philosophers are responsible for the cultural discrimination suffered by women over the centuries, along with the attribution of female roles prevalent until just a few decades ago. As the philosopher Virginia Valiant notes: “Western philosophy was formed around an overlapping series of conceptual oppositions—reason/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature—coding a hierarchical understanding of the relationship of masculine and feminine that can be discerned throughout the 2,500-year history of the subject.”7
This masculinization of philosophical debate, in terms of topics, conceptual frameworks and even language, has arguably dissuaded many women from entering the field. At the same time, it has spurred the creation of a new branch, feminist philosophy, which as mentioned earlier, is trying to make up for centuries of male domination.
Historically, there have been any number of relevant female philosophers, whose contribution is now attracting growing attention. The cases from Hypatia of Alexandria in the fifth century to Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Stäel in the eighteenth century, along with many of the brilliant thinkers covered by this book, are evidence that women had to make much more effort to succeed in a field dominated by men. They might be seen as outliers, their work largely ignored by their male colleagues.8
Unfortunately, the gender imbalance in philosophy continues. Writing a decade ago, and citing a wide range of sources, Fiona Jenkins and Katrina Hutchison noted that just 21% of academic philosophers in the United States were women. At the same time, the number of women in prestigious institutions is disproportionately low, as is the ratio of articles by women in academic journals, other than those dedicated to feminism. The d...